Re: Oh My God

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Re: Oh My God
by Jim on Thursday 02/Aug/2007, @15:29

> Easy dude, beta status does not mean "mostly works" as you seem to think. Beta normally means "this is it, we won't be adding any more features, from now on we focus on making things work".

No, that's an alpha. It normally goes like this:

Alpha: Architecture finished, everything major is in place, mostly operational.

Beta: Ready for testing by end users.

Release candidate: Should actually be finished at this point, will be the final release if no major bugs are found.

There's a growing tendency to play cowboy and just release whatever you feel like in order to meet the deadlines, but that's the usual distinction between alpha/beta/rc that responsible software engineers use.

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Re: Oh My God
by André on Friday 03/Aug/2007, @02:21

Hasn't the Open Source mantra always been: release early, release often? I'm not sure if calling it "beta" is the smartest thing to do, and maybe alpha 2 would have been more appropriate, but the name tag doesn't really matter to me. I'm going to install it over the weekend and have a go at it.

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Re: Oh My God
by Aaron J. Seigo on Friday 03/Aug/2007, @03:21

i like your definitions. please, release your software using those guidelines and i'm sure you'll feel very satisfied.

our definitions are slightly different (well, not for RC ...). we do want people, particularly developers, testing things with the beta, particularly the libraries. your definitions are made for a different of software development model from another time. kde is a huge and dynamic project developed in an open, cooperative model. this change in development model (which you probably have noticed) results in needed changes in the traditional release models.

wait, wasn't that one of the most basic tenets of open source in the first place?

so yeah, please chill out, relax and think about why it was released. and no, it wasn't so we could listen to whinging. ;)

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Re: Oh My God
by nae on Saturday 04/Aug/2007, @16:07

Yes that's a different definition. Now that I know, as end-user, I'll never
try to test and bugreport KDE betas anymore and I'll always wait to..
(gamma ?) RC as you teach me.

Sorry for whinging, now that I know I'll never waste mine and your time anymore, and I'll warn other end-user too that kde betas are not for
bugreports of users but only for bugreports of developers.

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Re: Oh My God
by Larpon on Monday 06/Aug/2007, @19:38

You should be sorry for whinging...
Infact you should stop it completely.

Which part of "we do want people, particularly developers, testing things with the beta, particularly the libraries." didn't you get?

Of course they want other experienced developers to test their code at this stage.
How on earth would you test new a new library as an end user who presumably only know how to operate things though a GUI, when there are no GUI's for libraries (in far the most cases)?
As a developer you'd like -particularly- other developers to test your library by using calls or functions in it.. which makes it hard for end users if they don't know how to write code which uses the library...

The corner stones and most fundamental things like the libraries, has to be _very_ functional before you can even think about building an application, hence GUI, on top which people like you can fiddle around with and deliver your optional bug reports.
Aaron even said they want people to test it and give feedback.

But my guess is that the devs will get more bug reports on crashes in the early GUI, from end users, which aren't the focus point and probably are just there as a placeholder for some other GUI. The more fundamental things like libraries are probably more important at this stage in development as I see it.

Therefore you really need to relax and take a deep breath before crying out about crashes or missing stuff in the graphical user interface (referring to the Great Great Great Grandparent Post here).

...And chill.. no one said they didn't want your end user bug reports? a developer bug report is maybe just a bit more specific on the exact problem at this point?

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Re: Oh My God
by Vide on Saturday 04/Aug/2007, @06:12

Ok, that's how, for example, Microsoft works. This is opensource, this is KDE, so this works differently

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